You Are Valued by the Problems You Solve (3x Your Abilities Using The Hypnagogic Method)
Legendary in 3 min
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Salvatore Dali just started to doze off and a loud “CLANG!” rang in his room.
Startled, he woke up from his slumber and continued to scribble on his notepad.
A few hours later, it happened again. The funny thing was, this was not an accident, this was planned.
You see, Dali didn’t believe in sleeping. He would actually hold a spoon in his hand when he slept and left a metal plate on the floor so when he nodded off, the spoon would fall, hit the plate and that sound would wake him up.
Turns out, this was one of the ways he got his most creative ideas.
And he was not alone.
Beethoven
Albert Einstein
Thomas Edison
Alexander the Great
Robert Louis Stevenson
All of them have used this technique at one point or another to tap into their most creative state. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that the earliest stage of sleep, also known as N1 or hypnagogia, is a fertile breeding ground for creative ideas.
In 2021, researchers at the Paris Brain Institute decided to study this technique.
103 study participants were exposed to mathematical problems without knowing that a hidden rule allowed solving them almost instantly. 16 people cracked the clue right away and they were removed from the study. The remaining participants were asked to take a 20 minute break and held a drinking glass in their right hand.
They were all measured to see at which stage of sleep they were in. Turns out, 83% of those who spent 15 seconds in the N1 stage (hypnagogia) discovered the hidden rule, compared to just 30% for those who remained awake. That’s almost a 300% improvement!
Salvatore Dali in bed. Photo Credit: Scientific American
BASE PRINCIPLE
The creative sweet spot is right before you fall asleep.
WHAT IF?
What if you could generate more ideas? What if you could have a method to improve your creative problem solving abilities by up to 300%?
In 2023, researchers from Harvard and MIT wanted to see if they could extend the Paris study into realms more commonly associated with creativity, such as storytelling. And they wanted to improve the method in which participants were woken up.
They developed a device called Dormio that could be used for targeted dream incubation. This device includes a glove the measures the three physiological markers of sleep - muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance - and communicates them to a smartphone app.
Targeted dream incubation involved measuring when participants entered the N1 stage and then prompting them to dream about specific topic. Then as they enter the next stage of sleep, the app would wake them up, asks them to report their dream and records their response.
In this study, 49 participants were split into four groups and spent 45 minutes:
Napping: think about trees
Napping: observe their thoughts
Staying awake: think about trees
Staying awake: observe their thoughts
After the 45 minutes, they were measured on three creative tasks:
Write a creative story about trees
List as many creative uses as they can about trees
Respond to a list of nouns with the first verb that came to mind
Turns out, Group 1 (targeted dream incubation) performed 43% more creatively than Group 2 (just napping) and performed 78% more creatively than Group 4 (just staying awake)!
Since the Dormio is not available to all of us normal people, we can still leverage this research study to boost our own creativity!
Introducing the Home Hypnagogic Method
1/ Topic of focus
Think about one topic or a problem you’ve been trying to solve
2/ N1 setup
Find a comfortable chair that is on a hard surface. Hold a metal object with your dominant hand.
3/ Relax and drift
Close your eyes with the intent of taking a nap.
4/ Wake and record
Once the metal object makes a loud noise, take your phone and record your thoughts about the topic.
5/ Repeat
Go through step 1-4 until you are no longer able to fall asleep.
“When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another”
Salvatore Dali
I hope you’ll be able to experiment and try this legendary creative method.
Go boost your creativity, my fellow legends!
Live your legend,
Sources:
Trafton, Anne, The Moment When You’re Nodding Off is a Sweet Spot for Creativity, MIT News, May 15, 2023 - LINK
We Are at Our Most Creative Just Before we Fall Asleep, Scientists Say, World Economic Forum, January 7, 2022 - LINK
Oudiette, Delphine et al., Sleep Onset is a Creative Sweet Spot, Science Advances, Vol 7, Issue 50, December 8, 2021 - LINK
Intagliata, Christopher, Salvador Dali’s Creative Secret is Backed by Science, Scientific American, January 3, 2022 - LINK